Statistics. Can’t live with ’em, can’t choose between coffee and tea without ’em.

Marketers and politicians live or die by what stats we can dig up to prove our most spurious points. We’ve even developed a sense of humour, occasionally, about them, like in the old Guinness ads that proclaimed that 86% of statistics are made up on the spot.

But I couldn’t help but scoff at the statement-of-the-bleedin’-obvious that just hit my inbox from MarketingSherpa.

They’ve done a survey!

And guess what: it turns out that “online marketers who think e-mail effectiveness is increasing have a much different approach to budgeting than those who tink the tactic is becoming less worthwhile.”

Basiclly, it’s saying take your lead from the pirates and don’t care about the details but about the booty…focus in on the big things (the treasure) and stay focused on that. That is who cares what the boat looks like, if you’ve got a boat that can sail and take pirates and guns then go for it.

AdViking thinks of this three ways:

Individually – Now’s not a time to back down, it’s a time to get focused, agressive and remember our viking (early pirates) roots

Start-ups – Find your niche, don’t boil the ocean and if you can stay the course, you should be in a good postiion

Big co’s – Don’t under-invest in your digital strategy. Invest more but in the right areas. Google only really has Search advertising. Cut them off at the knees and find a new approach to Search. Move your Display business away from DoubleClick now. Get going with your Mobile and Social Media strategies…

Building on the excitement created by the location services available through the iPhone. Mozilla Labs announced release of the Geode plugin for Firefox. It’s an extension that will be fully baked in 3.1 and talks to the same Skyhook service that iPhone and iTouch uses to help locate you and communicate to other services about your location.

This is interesting as generally to date the conversation about LBS has been around mobile but this is a natural extension into the browser and starts to overcome the difficulty with targeting location on IP.

Here’s what Mozilla Labs says about the importance of this:

The potential here is for more than just resturant lookups. For example, imagine an RSS reader that knows the difference between home and work and automatically changes it’s behavior appropriately. Or a news site whose local section is, in fact, actually local. Or Web site authentication that only allows you to login from certain physical locations, like your house.

AdViking says this is all fine and dandy and may provide an incremental data stream to enhance ad targeting but thinks the real value is only going to be mined and opened up by services that communicate openly with their users.

As you may have already gathered, AdViking is plagued by multiple personality disorder, and one of those many facets is now up and blogging over on BrandRepublic as of last night. To paraphrase an 80’s band, the Blogosphere Will Eat Itself…

There, as here, AdViking notes something of an upsurge of comments/questions/pontifications about the significance of Web 3.0 though… as well as picking up on comments found below refering to the Facebook trials.

Annoying as the term will doubtless become it presents a useful wireframe to hang speculation about what comes next.

For me? It’s the next step on the path to personal relevance: more relevant search results/dynamic content/social networking based on intelligent interpretation of what the ‘right’ answer is to the question I’ve asked.

A good portion of that relevance should come from location information… where can can begin to really unlock the value of the web’s growing ubiquity and portability.

AdViking was probably a bit hasty earlier this year in suggesting that people were burnt on social networks in the UK. Hitwise has released some stats over the last month that show this just the opposite, well at least for Facebook UK.

Facebook Enters Top 3

Hitwise says that Facebook is now the third most visited site in the UK, with 2.75% of all UK visits in July going to Facebook. In the graph below they are comparing Facebook to Live Mail (Hotmail) and eBay UK – though from the caveats given, if Hitwise bundled in a couple of other eBay properties they would be higher.

What AdViking thinks is interesting here is that Facebook is a major traffic destination, which brings a couple of questions to mind:

Due to the social nature of Facebook and the easy ability to recommend links what is the downstream effect of Facebook growing?

And is this hitting Search Engines at all? (If yes to 2. then the Live Search / Facebook deal could be quite a coup).

Facebook #1 of the Social Networks

Then just looking at the UK Social Networks, Hitwise has it that Facebook is now heavily leading the league table with a 45.29% market share.

The most striking point is that this growth has come at the expense of Bebo (which was historically strong in the UK and part of the appeal to AOL) and mostly MySpace, which shed 50% of it’s market share.

Couple of other interesting points:

Club Penguin is #6 – pretty impressive for a virtual world aimed at 8-12 year olds

Nasza Klasa @ #8 is a Polish network, which highlights the digital nature (and probable education level) of the plumbers, painters and cleaners, etc. who have come from Poland to the UK

So, as AdViking said earlier, it was probably a little too early to start sounding the death knell for Facebook this year but the burning question then has to be: How will they successfully monetise all this traffic?